Shrink-wrapped inclusion: A sociology of access to education for deaf students

www.ips.gu.se/english
A sociology of access to education for deaf students
Ernst D. Thoutenhoofd | June 2014
Shrink-wrapped inclusion

Aim and content of this presentation
Aim
To describe a double paradox in deaf-inclusive education:
– inclusion reproduces exclusion
– in reason we lose our individuality –Friedrich Schiller 1
Content
Explanandum | Experiences of deaf students in HE
– Their access in Scotland and the Netherlands
– The ‘Have you heard?’ study
Explanans
– Deafness as extensible concept
– How included deaf students are made
and make themselves

On emigration
We cannot be the unmoved movers or take the view from nowhere. 2

Explanandum | Experiences of deaf students in
higher education

Deaf students in Scottish HE (2002–03) 3
• Students’ perceptions of the level
and quality of support may not
accord with those of access and
support staff.
• Comments from students suggest
that levels of access and support
vary across institutions, and this is
a factor for students deciding
where to study.
• Lack of awareness and the need
for self-notification may cause
delays in the organisation of
access arrangements.
• A number of students felt that they
needed to work harder than peers
to achieve the same goals.
n=28
• Students report that group
tutorials and seminars are most
challenging, accepting as
‘inevitable’ that it is difficult to
devise effective access and
support strategies for those
situations.
• Although some deaf students in
the sample report a positive social
experience at their HE institution,
the majority find social
participation difficult and
unrewarding.
• As expected, some students are
uncomfortable being identified as
deaf by way of the high visibility of
access and support arranged for
them, while others accept it as
part of a Deaf identity.

Deaf students in Dutch HE (2010–13) | context 4
• There is reported structural
underperformance of primary and
secondary deaf education.
• Deaf youngster are at risk in
school-work transitions, and at risk
of relative underemployment.
• They are at habitual risk of social
exclusion in- and outside
education.
• Secondary school results contra-
indicate tertiary education.
• Policy measures punish
institutions for study delays.
• There is unwillingness to be a
magnet for sub-optimal students.
• There is negligible legal
imperative or grass-roots activism.
• Contextual data collection is
culturally impopular.
• There is comparatively modest
public awareness or disquiet.

Deaf students in Dutch HE | findings 4
• There is strong, significant
interaction between hearing
impairment and study delay.
• 16 respondents could not
specify their deafness on
registration; 13 refused.
• In assessments they benefit
from adjustments in place for
other (e.g. dyslectic) students.
• Deaf students get general
support, but wish for specific
support.
• Deaf students wish for cutting
edge technologies, e.g.:
– courses to run in social media
(facebook)
– smartphone app courses
– instant message networking
– speech-to-text autotranslation
n=47

Deaf students in Dutch HE | data example 4
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
adapted curriculum
adapted materials
adapted learning environment
advance access materials
adapted traineeships
adapted time schedule
Granted
Wished
for

Deaf students in Dutch HE | interviews 5,6
Hazekamp 2012, n=5
• Deaf students avoid students
who talk a lot.
• They tend to sit in the front of
teaching rooms.
• They make little use of study
advisors or support.
• Instead, they arrange their own
support.
• Some only attend when that is
obligatory.
Quist 2012, n=7
• Lack of support is structural
feature of educational career.
• Some choose a university for
the proximity of deaf peers, not
for a particular programme.
• Some stop HE for lack of
literacy skills.
• Those who do well do not feel
addressed by university support:
it is ‘for other students’.

The first paradox in detail
• While inclusion (such as university support) compensates for the
functional impairments of students and so enables their physical
participation,
• many students appear to actively avoid support, since
– they don’t feel addressed by the stated categories of need,
– they feel stigmatised and/or excluded by being singled out,
– they experience the support as misdirected or failing,
– and/or the core business of HE does not include them.
Strong claim | while HE includes deaf students nominally, it
excludes them by doing so physically and not intellectually or
intelligently.

The ‘have you heard?’ study 2011–13 7
• 79,158 students from the universities of Oldenburg and
Groningen and the applied sciences university of Utrecht were
mailed invitations to an online survey.
• 10,466 (13%) students completed the survey.
• In addition to a range of personal and study-related data,
students were asked to self-report,
– when relevant, standard questionnaires on hearing loss,
tinnitus and/or hyperacusis;
– measures of psychosocial strain and judgments of speech
recognition under different auditory conditions
(Oldenburg Inventory);
– measures of their ‘perception of listening ease’ (PLE).

The ‘have you heard?’ study | key data 7
• 28.8% of respondents indicated impaired audition.
Of these,
• 55% report hyperacusis, 14% hearing loss, and 7% tinnitus;
• 6% report a combination of tinnitus and hyperacusis, 4% a
combination of all three;
• 22% experience psychosocial stress due to impaired audition;
• the level of psychosocial stress rises along the dimension of
severity of the impairment.

The ‘have you heard?’ study | study disruption 8
• 50% of students report very often or almost always
experiencing concentration loss due to noise disruption.
• 48% fail to hear questions posed by fellow students.
• 20% report that lack of understanding results from disruption.
• 28% need to work harder as a consequence.
• 14% need to ask further clarifications due to noise disruption.
• 11% leave lectures.
N=7,321
Utrecht PLE data were excluded following technical error.

The ‘have you heard?’ study | disruption types 8
hi-fi noise disruption
• 70% talk noise
• 31% people movements noise
low-fi noise disruption
• 15% climate and ventilation noise
• 11% technical equipment noise

The ‘have you heard?’ study | student proposals 8
• Students prioritise raising lecturers’ skills (8.6%), imposing
norms on student behaviour (6.5%) and various technical
solutions (8.4%).
• Students with auditory impairments are up to 4% more likely to
advise corrective measures than are hearing students.
However, greater differences were observed when sorting
student responses by institution:
• Oldenburg students proposed imposing norms on students
behaviour and raising didactic skills of lecturers 2x more often.
• Groningen students proposed online lectures 3x more often
and were 6x more likely to advise technical control solutions.

The ‘have you heard?’ study | Groningen data 9
van den Dool 2012, n=2.202
• Very little use is made of support.
• Students do not expect a study-
delay.
• Hearing impaired students (n=571)
do not experience greater study
barriers than do hearing
respondents (n=1.631)

The ‘have you heard?’ study | conclusions 8
• A holistic understanding of the sound of study suggests that
the bare facts hearing impairment prevalence rates among
students are transcended and that listening be re-socialised,
approached as a shared sociocultural performance that is
based on collective and continually evolving habits.
• Hearing disorder, we suggest, describes those persistently
adverse social circumstances of hearing and listening that are
collectively owned and given by social norms and material
culture, subsuming a wide variety of physical (sensory) and
psychological traits.

The second paradox in detail
• The scientific understanding of hearing impairment is ever
more enumerative, data-intensive, ranking and narrowing,
• so that the public response to hearing impairment tends ever
more towards the abstract and impersonal, and toward
categorial attributions.
Nb, this observation mirrors Schiller’s critique of Kant’s practical
reason: if we are dominated by pure or practical reason, we lose
our individuality and become mere members of a species,
because we are divested from our particularities. 1

Explanans | a sociology of shrinkwrapped
access

For me, the ends of sociology are:
• to make the ordinary appear strange
(so that new horizons for collective action may appear);
• to remind ourselves that things can always be different
(which implies that all facts are underdetermined);
• and uncover the structuring operations of power
(that is, to see order).

Wiebe Bijker

We live in a sociotechnical world. 10

Deafness is a sociotechnical
and extensible concept.

I moved—a silent exile on this earth 11
As in his dreary cell one doomed for life,
My tongue is mute, and closed ear heedeth not;
Deep silence over all, and all seems lifeless;
The orators exciting strains the crowd
Enraptur’d hear, while meteor-like his wit
Illuminates the dark abyss of mind—
Alone, left in the dark—I hear them not.
The balmy words of God’s own messenger
Excite to love, and troubled spirits sooth—
Religion’s dew-drops bright—I feel them not.
—Hartford Asylum student, 1880

Deafness is a relationship, not a state 11
…and the use of the silence metaphor is one indication of how
the relationship is dominated by hearing. Hearing is defined as
the universal, and deafness as emptiness.

Chinese women bind their babies’ feet 11
…to make them small;
the Flathead Indians
bind their babies’ heads
to make them flat. Those
who prohibit sign
language in the schools
are denying the deaf
their their free mental
growth and are in the
same class of criminals.
Convention of American
Instructors of the Deaf
member, 1890

Deafness is partly a product of sociotechnology
1 neonatal screening technologies
2 neurolinguistic (imaging) technologies
3 audiological instruments and tests
4 acoustics instruments and tests
5 aids to hearing
6 cochlear implantation and surgery
7 rehabilitation and its monitoring systems
8 genetics and counselling techniques
9 sign language corpora
10 educational attainment tracking systems
11 Learning support such as laptops, notetaking and extra time
12 social (incidence) statistics and (psychological) classifications

You find yourself in a dark room
and you cannot hear. 12
What will you look for, a hearing aid or the light switch? Like all
of us, deaf people do not live by the absence of sensory input,
but by their presence. Although definitional of deafness, not
hearing is a circumstantial attribute of being deaf.

This conflict of impulses, 13
…to ‘repair’ on the one hand, and to acknowledge diversity on
the other, must be one of the deepest contractions of the twenty-
first century. Deaf people, whether they like it or not, live their
lives in the middle of this contradiction.

Bruno Latour

Latour’s gathered objects 14
Technological objects are combinations of things acting as
matters of fact and things acting as matters of concern.

Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy
Space shuttle explosion in lego 2010

Ian Hacking

Hacking’s classification of objects and ideas 15
Indifferent kinds
• unaware of being classified
• constantly active
• e.g. a pathology of deafness
• Interactive kinds
• aware of being classified
• dynamically interactive
• e.g. deafness

I have added technology as producing
a distinct class of ‘fixed’ kind
Indifferent kinds
• unaware of being
classified
• constantly active
example
pathology of deafness
deaf gene
Interactive kinds
• aware of being
classified
• dynamically
interactive
example
deafness
hearing impairment
Determinate kinds
• aware of being classified
• interactive and
dynamically constant
example
the cochlear implanted child
the language-delayed child
the deaf pupil
the included deaf student

The sociotechnical character of
determinate kinds
Determinate kinds stabilise or ‘fix’ meanings and so create the
illusion of historical and synchronic, calculable equivalence.
Example: the quantified self/other | Deaf students can self-
identify or be identified (singled out), classify or be classified,
monitor or be monitored, and compare or be compared with
other students on measures of educational inclusion,
educational performance, linguistic competence, and so on.
Enumeration is at the heart of determinate kinds. Determinate
kinds serve a sociotechnical ecology of scientific, public and
individual ends through technical means for (self-)monitoring.

Zygmunt Bauman

Liquid modernity 16
In Bauman’s liquid modernity, the relationship between
individuals and the state is compared to caravanning:
individuals exhibit a passing association with the environments
they inhibit, with caravanner and campsite-owner avoiding
deeper commitments either side.
Rather than caravanners organising collectively in search of
better provisions at any one site, they simply move on.
The claim is that we are ‘free to choose’; but there is no liberty in
the imperative of choice—it has become our destiny.
By implication, we are all migrants.

‘…how can we be kind, benevolent and humane toward others if
we lack the capacity genuinely and truly to accept alien nature in
ourselves, to adopt alien situations and to make alien feelings
into our own?’
Final thought 1

The workshop
Claim
The central problem with the notion of inclusion is that it is never
clear who, where or what is ‘alien’: precisely who is excluded
from precisely what? Is it not a dog chasing after its own tail?
Thought-experiment
Hence if we would mean to ‘truly’ include the learners that
inclusive education circularly excludes then education might be
openly playful, drawing on the particular contributions to
developing learning that all those who learn can make.

References
1. Schiller, F. [1794] (2009) Über die ästetische Erziehung des Menschen | On the æsthetic education of man.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
2. Greene, M. and Griffiths, M. (2003) Feminism, philosophy and education: imagining public spaces, in N. Blake, P.
Smyers, R. Smith and P. Standish (eds) The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of education, pp.73–92. Oxford:
Blackwell.
3. Brennan, M., Grimes, M. and Thoutenhoofd, E.D. (2005) Deaf students in Scottish higher education: a report for
the Scottish Funding Council. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh.
4. Thoutenhoofd, E.D. and van den Bogaerde, B. (2010) deaf students in Dutch higher education. Paper presented
to the Equality, Diversity Inclusion Conference. Vienna: Vienna University of Economics and Business.
5. Hazekamp, J. (2012) ‘Al gehoord?’ Kwalitatief onderzoek naar studiebarrières en copingstijlen van studenten met
een gehoorbeperking. Master dissertation. Groningen: The University of Groningen.
6. Quist, Y. (2010) Doof studeren. Master dissertation. Groningen: The University of Groningen.
7. Schulze, G., Rogge, J., Jacobs, G., Knot-Dicksheit, J., Thoutenhoofd, E.D. and van den Bogaerde, B. (2013)
Grundlagenstudie zur Erfassung der Hörfähigkeit von Studierenden an den Universitäten Oldenburg, Groningen und
der Hochschule Utrecht, in Empirische Sonderpädagogik nr1, S.85–99.
8. Thoutenhoofd, E.D., Knot-Dickscheit, J., Rogge, J., van der Meer, M., Schulze, G., Jacobs, G. and van den
Bogaerde, B. (under review) The sound of study: student experiences of listening in the university soundscape.
Manuscript.
9. Van den Dool, R. (2012) ‘Al gehoord?’ Een kwantitatief onderzoek naar studenten met een beperking aan het
gehoor. Master dissertation. Groningen: The University of Groningen.

10. Bijker, W. (1997) Of bicyles, bakelites and bulbs. Cambridge: MIT.
11. Baynton, D.C. (1992) ‘A silent exile on this earth’: the metaphorical construction of deafness in the nineteenth
century. in American Quarterly 4(2):216–243.
12. Thoutenhoofd, E.D. (1999) See deaf: on sight in deafness.
https://www.academia.edu/527261/See_deaf_On_sight_in_deafness.
13. Padden, C. and Humphries, T. (2006) Inside Deaf culture. Harvard: Harvard UP.
14. Latour, B. (2004) Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. in Critical
Inquiry 30(2):225–248.
15. Hacking, I. (1999) The social construction of what? Harvard: Harvard UP.
16. Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Shrink-wrapped inclusion: A sociology of access to education for deaf students

Recomendados

Recomendados

Mais conteúdo relacionado

Mais procurados

Mais procurados (10)

Destaque

Destaque (11)

Semelhante a Shrink-wrapped inclusion: A sociology of access to education for deaf students

Semelhante a Shrink-wrapped inclusion: A sociology of access to education for deaf students (20)

Mais de Ernst Thoutenhoofd

Mais de Ernst Thoutenhoofd (20)

Último

Último (20)

Shrink-wrapped inclusion: A sociology of access to education for deaf students

Notas do Editor